The B-side of the vinyl is engraved with a Karl Marx line: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” That quote sets the temperature for “In Defense of Lost Causes,” the new six-song EP from Nantes hardcore band Circles — a short, fast, openly leftist record out April 3, 2026 via Shield Recording.
Six originals, one vinyl-exclusive SSD cover (“Glue”), and three guest vocalists pulled in from a small network of French and Irish friends.The EP is a course correction. Circles’ usual coordinates — melodic hardcore with nods to Dag Nasty and One Last Wish — haven’t shifted, but this one leans harder on the hardcore side of that equation.
Vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Guillaume Salort puts the process like this: “Work for the previous LP was a bit intense, we took time to write it, the studio session was a bit hard cause maybe we saw too big, and we wanted to take the opposite of this process and go back to the basics, a short and fast EP. We mainly had a big practice over a weekend to write everything and we recorded the songs a few weeks after in one weekend too at New Record studios with our friend Séverin.” The artwork went the same way — cut and paste, oldschool, collective.
“Trying to find the urge and enthusiasm you have when you start a new band,” Salort says. “I thinks it kinda worked.”
Here’s the band walking through it song by song.
“Frontline”
“This one is about the fact that it will always be safer to fight than to resign to apathy and/or security,” Salort says, “because when you let the enemy take space, even if you feel safe right now, he will always come at you at some point, better stop him before it’s too late.”
The guest on the track is Kroquette, who also wrote the lyrics to her parts. “We invited our friend Kroquette to sing on this one, she also wrote the lyrics to her parts. We know her for a long time from her musical and political activism in Angers, a city close to Nantes, who suffered from numerous neonazi attacks those last years. She used to play drums in Neuf Volts and she is now active in Carmen Carbone and also just released her first solo record under the name Sorcellerie. The fun thing is that she recorded her vocal part in her car, down the street to not annoy her neighbors.”
The piano intro has its own backstory. It was originally the break riff from “Vampyre,” the EP closer. “During the EP practices Mathias started to play this riff like it was an American Football song, we liked it but since we decided to make a more fast forward hardcore ep with short songs we thought it didn’t fit. But, as it sounded good, we transposed it to piano/melotron and it became the EP intro.”
“War”
“This was inspired by Mathieu Rigouste book ‘La guerre globale contre les peuples,'” Salort explains. “It talks about how capitalism has always survived by being at war with the working class and colonized people, from domestic control, to global repression, to genocides. Capitalism is war, since its beginning. The words in D in the gang vocals at the end echo to Deny, Defend, Depose, you know why.”
“Defend”
Salort wrote the bones of “Defend” more than two decades ago, for one of his first bands. He pulled it back out for this EP and the band rebuilt it. “Of course, more than two decades later, it sucked,” he admits. “But i wanted to do something with it and since we decided to work on fast, straight-forward songs, it felt that those 40 seconds would be nice along the other ones. We all wrote new riffs, Antoine found this weird drum pattern with a bell on the chorus and we even added a drum machine.”
Lyrically it threads into the rest of the EP. “All lyrics in the EP are linked and this one echoes straight to Frontline and War. You can find references to other songs in almost all the tracks, it can be song titles in the lyrics, answers to some phrases, same lexical field etc. This one was supposed to be a football metaphor but it’s been lost in the writing process. It says that since attack is the best defense, we have to stand together to have a chance to win in these proto-fascist times.”
Guest vocals on this one come from Béatrice Myself, who used to front Neuf Volts — a band from Tours Circles are linked to. She also drew their last shirt.
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“Revenge”
“This one goes back to the fundamentals: seizing the means of production, seizing the housing, seizing everything since it’s all ours.”
The riff started as a Negative Approach rip-off and the band tried to drag it somewhere else. “We had this Negative Approach kind of rip off riff/structure but we wanted to make it sound more Circles, we tried to give it a dub spin but it didn’t work so we assumed the idea and we invited our friend Mick from An Slua to write and sing the first part with his beautiful skinhead voice.”
The Mick story goes back years. “We met him with our previous band years ago while touring Ireland when he was still a poppunker with hair trying to be Mark Hoppus and playing in Stick Around with the rest of An Slua boys. We always kept in touch and made a few shows with An Slua 2 years ago, we share good friendship with all of them and the same political views.”
“Cage”
The only song here not written for the EP. “We wrote it a few years ago but somehow it didnt make it to the previous LP, i think we didn’t liked the guitars on the chorus at the time and we reworked it for IDOLC. We had fun trying to make it sound a bit heavy metal.”
The track also gave the EP its title — indirectly. “Lyrics talk about dreaming big, not letting the political standards shape our way of thinking and that we have to fight for the world we really want to live in, even if we’re told that it’s impossible. It shapes the EP title In Defense Of Lost Causes, which is the name of a book by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. To be honest i didn’t read this one but its title always resonate in me and, i think, this is a good sum up of what punk and leftist politics mean to me. That we have to fight for everything we believe in, we cant give up on our ideas because we fear to lose the battle, if we water-down our political beliefs it will always end up strengthening the ‘reasonable’ liberal consensus and the idea that our big emancipatory political ambitions are too naive and have no chance to succeed.”
“Vampyre”
The Marx quote engraved on the B-side is the seed. “The vampire metaphor comes from a Karl Marx quote ‘Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.'”
Salort wrote the lyrics a few days after Elon Musk’s nazi salute at the Trump inauguration. “Its about how capitalism will always choose fascism to survive and how people who are ready to join nazi ideology are way more than we think. Here in France, medias, politics and billionaires have been more and more at ease with imposing their fascist views everywhere. The government even made one minute silence lately to honor the memory of a nazi activist who died after attacking antifas in the streets of Lyon. The last sentence is a Chumbawamba quote from their song The day the nazi died. It was written months before Lyon’s events but feels even more accurate now.”
“Glue” (vinyl-exclusive SSD cover)
“This SSD cover is a vinyl exclusive,” Salort says. “We had a show planned the week Al Barile passed away, we thought it will be nice to cover Glue, i think the few lyrics are a good way to conclude on a positive note, all the topics approached in the ep. In my opinion this is one of the greatest 80’s hardcore classics, the songwritting is just perfect (mosh/fast with singalong, 3 times, period) and the lyrics sum up the whole hardcore spirit in just one sentence.”
“We love to cover hardcore classics. No matter how far we’ll go into emo/post-hc/poppier sounds, Circles is and will alway be a hardcore band.”
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“In Defense of Lost Causes” is out now via Shield Recording.
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